[maemo-developers] policy: maemo packaging policy -draft

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:32:22AM +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
>> A draft version of the "maemo packaging policy" is available
>> for commenting:
>>      https://maemo.org/forrest-images/pdf/maemo-policy.pdf
>>
>> If you're packaging software for maemo, please take a look at it.
> 
> * Testing on a device with no extra packages is a hard to do, unless
>   you have two devices, or you're not actually using the one you have.

Maybe this would be better:
   As a result, package installation and uninstallation MUST be
   tested (also) on the device, before the package is uploaded to
   the repositories.  Test device SHOULD NOT have extra software
   installed.


>   I wish we had a complete hardware emulator so that you could test
>   package installation on a pristine rootfs in a virtual machine.

Qemu got recently some preliminary N8x0 support:
http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/trunk/Changelog?revision=4490&root=qemu&view=markup

I haven't tried it myself.


In theory the better package dependency / Busybox testing should be
possible on Desktop & x86 too, but there's no ready made maemo x86
image that one could boot in x86 system Qemu.



> * Interactive prompts from maintainer scripts (such as asking where
>   do you want to stick this new thing in your menus) are annoying for
>   the user.  I'd be inclined to add a sentence or two saying that these
>   SHOULD be avoided where possible.

Along with selecting sensible defaults so that if/when the GUI tools
will support non-interactive mode like the Debian tools do, the package
wouldn't do anything stupid.  Debconf support is not currently planned
though.


> * Splitting translations has a question about Debian/Ubuntu.  I'm not a
>   developer of either, but as far as I know Debian ships translation
>   files for all languages in the same .deb that contains the software,

Which has the drawback that translations are tied to the software
updates...

>   while Ubuntu collects all translations from a big group of related
>   packages into a language-pack-$group-$languagecode, so you end up
>   with language-pack-lt, language-pack-gnome-lt, language-pack-kde-lt
>   and so on.

Which at least earlier had the drawback of forcing Thunderbird, Firefox
and OpenOffice installation on Kubuntu...

 >   The Ubuntu solution is only possible because they release
 >   the whole stack at once.
 >
>> As stated in the policy document, the comments and questions on this
>> policy should be mailed to the maemo-developers mailing list with
>> word "policy" in the subject.
> 
> This thread qualifies. ;-)

Sure. :-)  Thanks for the feedback!


	- Eero